His name appears constantly in our articles – on British Spiritualism, on the Scole Experiment, at the SAGB, where a hall is named after him and his chair stands on display. We have never explained him. Here we do – and correct the story most often told about him.
The legend
It goes like this: Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of world literature's coolest rationalist, lost his son in the First World War – and grief turned him into a Spiritualist. The creator of Sherlock Holmes, broken by loss, suddenly believes in ghosts.
It is a good story. Its only drawback is that Doyle's own books say something else.
What he wrote himself
His son Kingsley died on 28 October 1918 of pneumonia, having been wounded at the Somme in 1916. In that same year, 1918, Doyle's book The New Revelation appeared – his public declaration of Spiritualism. And in it he describes his own path in a detail that leaves no doubt.
On finishing his medical education in 1882, he writes, he found himself "like many young medical men, a convinced materialist" as regards personal destiny. Around 1886 he read the reminiscences of the American Judge Edmonds on contact with his late wife – "with interest, and absolute scepticism". In Southsea, where he practised, he took his difficulties to General Drayson, one of the early British Spiritualists.
And then the passage where the legend falls apart. Doyle recounts finding, in the Spiritualist paper Light, a column reprinting what had appeared thirty years earlier:
As I read over this column recently I had quite a start as I saw my own name, and read the reprint of a letter which I had written in 1887, detailing some interesting spiritual experience which had occurred in a seance.
In the same paragraph he dates his final conviction – and it falls before Kingsley's death: it is "only within the last year or two" that he has declared himself satisfied with the evidence, which is why he cannot be accused of forming his opinion hastily. Written in 1918, published in 1918 – his son died in October of that year.
Doyle's interest is therefore at least thirty-one years old when he declares himself publicly, and his conviction reaches back before the loss. The war does play a part, but differently from the telling: it brought mass, sudden death into almost every British family – besides Kingsley, Doyle lost his brother Innes, two brothers-in-law and two nephews. The subject became urgent. His position he already held.
One may think what he believed was wrong. But the convenient explanation that a grieving father lost his mind is simply not what happened. With Oliver Lodge the case is different – his son Raymond was killed in 1915 and his book about it appeared in 1916. The two men are often lumped together. They do not belong in the same category.
The missionary
What followed was no quiet private faith. Doyle wrote The Vital Message (1919), The Coming of the Fairies (1922) and the two-volume History of Spiritualism (1926). In 1920 he travelled to Australia and New Zealand to campaign for the cause, and until his death he lectured across Britain, Europe and the United States. He spent his fame as the most widely read author of his age entirely on a subject that earned him ridicule.
That commitment includes the most embarrassing part: in 1922 Doyle published five photographs taken by two girls in Cottingley, said to show fairies, and held them to be genuine. They were faked – figures traced from a children's book, propped up with hatpins. The two admitted it decades later. Anyone wanting to defend Doyle cannot get around this story, and should not try.
The break with Houdini
The best-known episode of his Spiritualist life is the collapse of a friendship. Harry Houdini, the world's most famous escapologist, and Doyle had known each other since Houdini's appearances at the Brighton Hippodrome; the Houdinis were guests of the Doyles at Crowborough. Each genuinely liked the other.
On 17 June 1922 the Houdinis were visiting the Doyles at the Ambassador Hotel in Atlantic City. Sir Arthur offered a séance: his wife Jean, who practised automatic writing, had a feeling that a message might come through. Houdini's wife stayed outside at Doyle's express wish.
What Houdini wrote about it two years later in A Magician Among the Spirits is one of the most precise séance accounts we have. The day mattered to him particularly, he notes – it was his mother's birthday. And he did not come as an enemy:
I was determined to embrace Spiritualism if there was any evidence strong enough to down the doubts that have crowded my brain for the past thirty years.
Lady Doyle, Houdini writes, was seized by a spirit, her hands beat the table, Sir Arthur tried to calm her. Then she made a cross at the head of the page and began to write; Sir Arthur tore off each sheet and handed it to Houdini. His verdict is sober and sad at once:
I sat serene through it all, hoping and wishing that I might feel my mother's presence. There wasn't even a semblance of it.
His factual objection weighed more than the feeling: his mother, though almost fifty years in America, could neither speak nor read nor write English – yet the message was in fluent English. Doyle's answer to that Houdini also records: a spirit becomes more educated the longer it has been departed, and his mother had mastered English in heaven.
There followed a scene that illuminates the underlying problem. Doyle advised him to try automatic writing at home. Houdini picked up a pencil and wrote – by his own account fully consciously and of his own volition – the name "Powell". Doyle leapt up: this was his late comrade-in-arms Ellis Powell, "truly Saul is among the Prophets". Houdini explained that he had been thinking of his acquaintance Frederick Eugene Powell, an American magician with whom he was then in business correspondence. Doyle was unmoved; three days later he wrote to him: "No, the Powell explanation won't do."
After that, friends became public antagonists. Doyle's own tone in the letters Houdini reprints remains strikingly human – "I hate sparring with a friend in public, but what can I do when you say things which are not correct". Houdini's judgement of him is as apt as it is harsh:
He is a great reader who absorbs what he reads but he believes what he sees in print only if it is favorable to Spiritualism.
What remains
Doyle died on 7 July 1930 at Windlesham Manor in Crowborough, aged seventy-one, of a heart attack. He had given the last twelve years of his life to a cause that cost him standing and which he nonetheless held to be the most important of his life.
For us he is less interesting as a star witness – a prominent believer proves nothing – than as a case study in how quickly a catchy narrative displaces a documented history. The grieving-father version can be told in a single sentence. The documented version needs three decades, a letter from 1887, a Judge Edmonds and a general in Southsea. It is less convenient. But it is the one written in his books.
Sources: Throughout, the books of those involved. Arthur Conan Doyle, The New Revelation (1918) – chapter "The Search", full text at Project Gutenberg; likewise The Vital Message (1919, there) and The Coming of the Fairies (1922, there). The séance of 17 June 1922, Houdini's quotations and Doyle's letters follow Harry Houdini, A Magician Among the Spirits (Harper & Brothers, 1924), also in full text.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection – and our article on William Crookes, the scientist who fared much the same.